With version 11.0k of the S3 platform software, it may be possible to do an upgrade with just WinMFS, even if copying an already upgraded drive, and let it expand the 3rd MFS Media partition beyond 1.2 TB and get away with it.

Since people are using jmfs to copy the HD's original 160GB drive and add a single huge 3rd MFS Media partition and having it work, it would seem the 1.2TB barrier has been broken.

I've got somebody testing an HD done that way right now, and I'm getting ready to see if I can get an OLED S3 to co-operate as well.

WinMFS, of course, has the virtue of being able to take an Apple Free partition in stride instead of being thwarted by its presence.

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I have a 652 that I took to 1TB with WinMFS temporarily and then from there to a 2TB with jmfs. This was about a year ago. I'm not going to experiment on it because it works.

There's a guy contacted me away from TCF about his 652. I first thought to turn my helping him into a thread here, but he had so many questions and needed so much explained (and of course as chance would have it he had a GigaByte brand motherboard, so I had to school him on the whole HPAs and how to avoid them problem as well), that I just left it a tsunami of back and forth emails and a few phone calls.

But anyway, I'm getting him to expand it to a 2TB with just WinMFS, and waiting to see if it runs okay for a few days before declaring conditional success.

Like I said, that way or with jmfs, if you start from the 160GB drive, you wind up with a 3rd Media partition that's about 1.6TB either way.

I'm in the middle of a family member went to the hospital, I visited and brought home a germ and have been sick ever since and now they're back and I've got them to tend to while I'm still not well yet myself, but just before that I'd been fooling with a 648 and a 2TB, and since for some reason jmfs can't recognize a 648 drive as a TiVo drive, that only leaves the older stuff like WinMFS, and so I tried that and think I might have succeeded but there's an unrelated issue, so word on that will have to wait until I can get the time and unfuzzed brain to get back to messing with it, but I thought I'd get some other minds thinking.

What I've seen so far of people hex editing to get rid of an Apple Free partition on a 648 seemed overkill to me since WinMFS can handle them just fine--it's only jmfs that doesn't have provision to deal with variables like that.

Of course someone who understands the TiVo file system and partitioning scheme and all that better than I may come along and tell me I'm hopelessly mistaken.

If they'll be good enough to explain why in a way I can understand, then I and others will have learned something.

The 658, the HD XL, comes with a 1TB stock, and apparently only 2 MFS pairs, so either way should expand it into a 2TB with no problem since there won't be room for a partition over 1.2TB

This is interesting, it would be nice if we knew for sure that TiVo went with a unified kernel/code on all S3 boxes to handle the large partition size for the TiVo HD XL. It certainly would solve a bunch of problems.

Now all we need is for the Premier truncated/backup to a file efforts to pan out so that a utility that supports all platforms can be developed.

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What ever happened with this? I just did the same to my 2 Tivo HDs.. they boot, record, etc.. fine, but I'm curious to know if it is stable? If unitron doesn't have an update I guess I'll report back in a few weeks.

What ever happened with this? I just did the same to my 2 Tivo HDs.. they boot, record, etc.. fine, but I'm curious to know if it is stable? If unitron doesn't have an update I guess I'll report back in a few weeks.

I kind of lost track of the various threads where this has been discussed, so this one didn't get updated, but the sum of experiences over the past few months of several people, myself included, is that if your 648, 652, or 658 is running 11.0k, you can use WinMFS to put in a 2TB drive.

Hook up whatever drive you have in there now and a 2TB (after running the manufacturer's long test to make as sure as you can there's nothing wrong with it), use WinMFS, click on mfscopy to copy to the 2TB (setting a larger swap size if you want) and then when it finally finishes (after looking like it quit or froze for a while) and says you have extra room, do you want to expand, tell it no.

Then select the 2TB drive and click on mfsinfo to make sure everything looks okay.

You can put it in the TiVo at that point to test it, or roll the dice and expand first.

But you need to tell it no when it offers to expand after copying, and then expand as a separate step.

Click on mfsadd, and tell it to go ahead and exceed 1.2TB for the partition size when it warns against it.

The nice thing about WinMFS is being able to increase swap size if you want and if you're working from an already expanded drive with 3 MFS pairs already, it'll just "embiggen" that last MFS media partition to fill up the new space, so you don't run into jmfs's problem of not being able to deal with an Apple Free partition.

What ever happened with this? I just did the same to my 2 Tivo HDs.. they boot, record, etc.. fine, but I'm curious to know if it is stable? If unitron doesn't have an update I guess I'll report back in a few weeks.

If in doubt or you want to test you can record HD at the highest setting and I think it takes about 12 hours to fill the drive. if the MFS area is recordable then you're all set.

If in doubt or you want to test you can record HD at the highest setting and I think it takes about 12 hours to fill the drive. if the MFS area is recordable then you're all set.

What "setting" (on a TiVo HD) ?

2 TB gives you 300+ hours of HD, depending on the bit rate of the recorded video -- which is not settable.

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I kind of lost track of the various threads where this has been discussed, so this one didn't get updated, but the sum of experiences over the past few months of several people, myself included, is that if your 648, 652, or 658 is running 11.0k, you can use WinMFS to put in a 2TB drive.

I am looking at possibly upgrading a Series 3 (OLED) with a 2TB drive (WD20EURS). I have used WinMFS in the past with a 500GB drive and a image I have gotten from here (via dropbox) so am familiar with how to do it.

I can't remember if the image is 11.0k, but can I simply use the same image with a totally new 2TB drive? Or is something special required? I have contemplated a 1TB drive too (WD10EURX) and assume its just as simple as when I did it with a 500GB drive, correct?

I am looking at possibly upgrading a Series 3 (OLED) with a 2TB drive (WD20EURS). I have used WinMFS in the past with a 500GB drive and a image I have gotten from here (via dropbox) so am familiar with how to do it.

I can't remember if the image is 11.0k, but can I simply use the same image with a totally new 2TB drive? Or is something special required? I have contemplated a 1TB drive too (WD10EURX) and assume its just as simple as when I did it with a 500GB drive, correct?

Why not use WINMFS and copy the existing drive to a new 2TB and include everything and then expand it to 2TB?

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I am looking at possibly upgrading a Series 3 (OLED) with a 2TB drive (WD20EURS). I have used WinMFS in the past with a 500GB drive and a image I have gotten from here (via dropbox) so am familiar with how to do it.

I can't remember if the image is 11.0k, but can I simply use the same image with a totally new 2TB drive? Or is something special required? I have contemplated a 1TB drive too (WD10EURX) and assume its just as simple as when I did it with a 500GB drive, correct?

If the drive currently in the machine is still working, then it should have updated itself to 11.0k by now (maybe even 11.0m), so you could just use WinMFS's mfscopy to copy the whole thing to the 2TB and when it finally finishes (takes a while but you don't lose any recordings), and asks if you want to expand you say no.

Then, having previously selected the smaller drive before clicking mfscopy, you now select the 2TB drive and click mfsadd to do the expanding.

Don't know why it has to be 2 separate steps, but it does.

If you don't have a working drive from which to copy, you can restore the image to the 2TB instead, and not expand, and try that in the TiVo.

If it boots, you can see if you have 11.0k yet or not, and force connections and reboots until you do.

What ever happened with this? I just did the same to my 2 Tivo HDs.. they boot, record, etc.. fine, but I'm curious to know if it is stable? If unitron doesn't have an update I guess I'll report back in a few weeks.

I have used this procedure on my OLED S3 on 11/12. Has been stable ever since. Sooooo. I guess it depends on how long up and running you consider stable. I consider it stable.

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Why not use WINMFS and copy the existing drive to a new 2TB and include everything and then expand it to 2TB?

I suppose I could do this, but to be honest, whatever was recorded on the older drive is really not that important so I just figured it would be easier & faster to start over with a fresh image and no recordings. Maybe not though.

It will be faster. Make a backup of your existing drive, restore it to the new drive and expand. I would still as precaution tell it no to expand right after restore and then use MFSAdd to expand followed by supersize.

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The nice thing about WinMFS is being able to increase swap size if you want and if you're working from an already expanded drive with 3 MFS pairs already, it'll just "embiggen" that last MFS media partition to fill up the new space, so you don't run into jmfs's problem of not being able to deal with an Apple Free partition.

I'm going to be adding a 2TB drive tonight. What does increasing the swap size do for me? Faster in some way?

I'm going to be adding a 2TB drive tonight. What does increasing the swap size do for me? Faster in some way?

Back in the day of Series 1s, when "embiggening" drive size was being pioneered, it was discovered that the tricks and techniques a TiVo could use to repair scrambled software problems on itself needed some spare drive space and needed more as the drive got bigger.

The eventual rule of thumb that got developed (remember, none of this is official info from TiVo, Inc., it's all stuff that users worked out on their own) was 1MB of space for every 2GB of disk size.

Of course, that was back when a 120GB drive was considered huge (and expensive).

I think TiVo doubled the size of the swap partition when they brought out the Series 2 models, and have used that size ever since. Even the 1TB S3 HD XL has only 128MB of swap as I recall.

And lots of people have upgraded to 2TB drives without raising the size of the swap partition and appear to be getting along fine.

But as I see it, 1000MB, or 1024MB, which is a decimal or binary GB, on a 2TB drive is 15 minutes of standard definition video, so I just figure it as cheap insurance.

Back in the day of Series 1s, when "embiggening" drive size was being pioneered, it was discovered that the tricks and techniques a TiVo could use to repair scrambled software problems on itself needed some spare drive space and needed more as the drive got bigger.

The eventual rule of thumb that got developed (remember, none of this is official info from TiVo, Inc., it's all stuff that users worked out on their own) was 1MB of space for every 2GB of disk size.

Of course, that was back when a 120GB drive was considered huge (and expensive).

I think TiVo doubled the size of the swap partition when they brought out the Series 2 models, and have used that size ever since. Even the 1TB S3 HD XL has only 128MB of swap as I recall.

And lots of people have upgraded to 2TB drives without raising the size of the swap partition and appear to be getting along fine.

But as I see it, 1000MB, or 1024MB, which is a decimal or binary GB, on a 2TB drive is 15 minutes of standard definition video, so I just figure it as cheap insurance.

During the copy step, I ticked the checkbox to alter the Linux swap size and put in 4096. After the copy was done, msinfo states the swap is 128MB. Odd. I wonder if it is a reporting error, or if it didn't size the partition that large.

And lots of people have upgraded to 2TB drives without raising the size of the swap partition and appear to be getting along fine..

Most of us, me included, have probably not needed the file system repaired. I'm sure SWAP will be needed to fix a file system that size. I am sure we can run the checks ok but a repair would be a different animal.

During the copy step, I ticked the checkbox to alter the Linux swap size and put in 4096. After the copy was done, msinfo states the swap is 128MB. Odd. I wonder if it is a reporting error, or if it didn't size the partition that large.

1024 is the biggest number I've ever used in that box.

I don't know if there's an upper limit, but your results make it sound as though there is, and it (WinMFS) defaulted to the original size.

As I said previously, many people have left it at that size when upgrading to a 2TB, and seem to be getting along fine, so if it works otherwise you might want to leave it be.